@everyone :-) twitter is tweeter

At fast-growing Twitter.com, users pick who they’ll follow in the ultra-cool twitterstream

Photos by LEAH NASH / SPECIAL TO THE OREGONIAN

Rick Turoczy, a Portland blogger and marketing consultant, sends short Twitter messages from his laptop computer and iPhone at Backspace, an Old Town coffee shop and gallery. Nearly 1,200 people in the world follow him, meaning they have signed up to receive his “tweets,” as Twitter messages are called. He has sent nearly 6,000 tweets altogether, making him one of Portland’s most active Twitter users.

Tweeters define Twitter

We asked Portland’s Twitter community recently — via a tweet — how they would define Twitter. Here’s the online conversation:

gwalter (Gary Walter): Twitter is like walking thru the lobby of a convention center where you know a lot of people at the conference.

This is Twitter, a fast growing technology that defies easy description.

Find more links about Twitter on del.icio.us. To add your links to this list, tag them “oregoniantwitter”

“It’s like a cocktail party where you come in and out of interesting conversations,” says Turoczy, a high-tech marketing-communications consultant who works from his home office in Portland’s Garden Home neighborhood, where he lives with his wife and two children. But you won’t find the party in the physical world.

Here’s how it works: You register for free at Twitter.com. Then you find people to “follow” — those whose text messages you want to hear above the roar of the “twitterstream”: an estimated three million public messages exchanged daily among Twitter’s 1.3 million users.

Twitter is tiny compared to other online social networks; MySpace gets 72 million monthly unique visitors, Facebook 36 million. But Twitter’s recent explosive growth is a harbinger of an entirely new form of communication: citizens microblogging their thoughts and observations continually from home, work, coffee shops, airports, street corners — literally anywhere they can use a laptop or a cell phone.

More than 31,000 twitterers have signed up to follow Barack Obama, making the presidential hopeful one of the most-followed stars in the twitterverse. San Francisco protest leaders avoided arrest on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion in March by discreetly texting via Twitter instead of using walkie-talkies. A Berkeley graduate student in Egypt mobilized a global rescue effort in April by tweeting a single word: “Arrested.”

Most send far less dramatic messages, such as interesting Web sites or restaurant recommendations.

One Portland twitterer calls the service a singles bar for platonic friends and business contacts, all talking at once. Others call it sound-bite blogging, a virtual water cooler, a party, high-speed social networking, a stream of collective consciousness.

The most common question non-users ask: Why the heck would anyone want to twitter?

The answer: Twitter’s immediate nature, unlike MySpace and Facebook, tends to create communities and friendships that begin in cyberspace and quickly spill over into the real world.

“This,” Turoczy says, “is one of the few social-networking tools I know that actually fosters real interaction.”

Consider: Ten of Turoczy’s tweets this day are about Beer and Blog, a weekly gathering of Portland bloggers at The Green Dragon Bistro and Brewpub in Southeast Portland. He aims a tweet at vjb, the Twitter name of VJ Beauchamp, who writes the alt.portland blog: “Green Dragon at 4:00 for @beerandblog. Talking about Web stats and how it could influence your blogging.”

Even among hard-core users in metro Portland — we’re among Earth’s top 15 twittering cities — Turoczy is one of the twitteringest. He follows more than 1,500 other twitterers, is followed by more than 1,100 and has sent out nearly 5,700 tweets.

Before Turoczy sends his final tweet this day, he will have traded more than 150 messages with 28 friends and followers.

But long before the day ends, Turoczy’s twitterstream buzzes about his approaching afternoon interview with The Oregonian.

In the afternoon, as Turoczy sends tweets via his laptop at Backspace, an Old Town cafe and gallery, two more twitterers plop onto a nearby couch, rapt in face-to-face conversation. Another twitterer sits at a nearby table, exchanging long-distance tweets over his laptop with a fifth twitterer. They all met through Twitter, and they continue to converse through a mix of spoken words and tweets.

Translation: He’s at Backspace to meet Katherine Gray (thisKat), but that he has also run into Turoczy (turoczy), Bram Pitoyo (brampitoyo) and Nate Angell (xolotl). The “@” sign makes it easy to retrieve old tweets containing those names from Twitter’s archive.

Turoczy has blogged since the beginning of the decade and now has three blogs. Silicon Florist, the most popular, chronicles news in the Portland technology community. Like prolific Portland twitterer and heavyweight blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick (marshallk), he mines the local twitterverse for news tidbits.

“I’m not the most outgoing guy,” Turoczy says. Twitter, he says, has been a way for a shy guy to start talking with Portland.

Now, thanks to Twitter and Silicon Florist, Turoczy is one of the most visible names in Portland technology. But Twitter isn’t just for technology geeks.

One of Portland’s active users, SashaB, for example, is the 2003 Miss Nude Oregon, associate business manager of an adult Web site and a skin-care instructor. Simon Goetz, aka pagecrusher, is an ad copywriter, DJ and bard of the 140-character literary form: “Girlfriend thinks I’m chopped liver, bugs think I’m In ‘N Out Burger.”

After a long afternoon at Backspace, Turoczy’s tweets disappear from the local twittersphere as he goes home to other tasks. But he reappears at 10:22 p.m.:

“I’m just here to write a couple of blog posts. And then I’m going to take the rest of the night off. I mean it.”

He chats with other twitterers about, among other things, Rickrolling, a popular Internet prank that sends unsuspecting users to a music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up,” and OpenID, a technology for a single-digital identity that can be used across the Internet.

“OK. That’s all I’ve got,” Turoczy tweets at 1:03 a.m. “Signing off for the night.”